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Who shot first, Han or Greedo? It would probably be easier to tell for certain if everything were 8-bit. Then you'd see whose pixel bullet appeared first.
To celebrate this week's launch of its new mobile game Tiny Death Star, Disney artists have put a low-res spin on two memorable scenes from Star Wars, presented exclusively on WIRED. The game, like the business-simulation game Tiny Tower from which it was spawned, uses a faux 8-bit aesthetic, with bright colors and huge pixels.
"Adult fans of the movies really experienced them for the first time in the '80s," said Jon-Paul Dumont, studio director of Disney Mobile Palo Alto. "So you get this double nostalgia for the movies you were watching as a kid in the '80s and the look of the games you were playing in the '80s."
Redesigning the Star Wars cast in this way was no mean feat, said Dumont via phone earlier this week.
"Adapting that look to Star Wars was a real process between us, [Tiny Tower developer] NimbleBit, and the experts in Star Wars at LucasArts," he said. "Every art asset was put together by our internal artist based on a style guide from NimbleBit, and then run by the guys at LucasArts who then ran it by the experts at LucasFilm."
"It was a lot of round trips to get it right, down to just exactly how rosy Leia's cheeks should be, the specific color Yoda's ears should be," said Dumont. "Just about every character and every asset had multiple round trips to make sure we got it right."
Tiny Death Star is the first Star Wars game created after Disney's acquisition of LucasFilm last year.
"It just sort of happened that we were first out of the gate," Dumont said. "When the LucasArts acquisition happened, someone just suggested, what about Tiny Death Star, and a bunch of lightbulbs went off, and it kind of wrote itself from there on out."
With more and more games using a retro look, LucasArts team realized that the Tiny Death Star styles would be setting a precedent, Dumont said, so they were extra careful about each design decision.
"The team at LucasArts, they have a whole future legacy to think about," he said. "When they're making decisions, sometimes it isn't as simple as Darth Vader should be this shade of gray or black, they're thinking it in terms of two, five, 10 years."
"So they took not just a approval angle but a precedent-setting angle. They spent a lot of time figuring out, OK, what does a Stormtrooper look like in 8-bit? And what is a Stormtrooper going to look like in 8-bit forever?"
